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Purpose Ethical elaboration is an aspect of product involvement and this research examines the relationship between involvement and ethical consumption providing a more holistic understanding of ethical decision-­making. This paper identifies antecedents of both low and high involvement ethical product decision-­making at farmers’ markets, and with sustainable and energy efficient features in the housing market, respectively. Design/methodology/approach These aims are achieved through semi-­structured and in-­depth interviews with consumers and sellers of ethical products across low and high involvement domains. Findings The empirical investigation reveals new insights into the constructs considered when purchasing high involvement ethical products. Barriers are discussed and findings examine the relationships between trust, information, ethical motivation and signalling. Research implications A research process framework for the study of ethical decision-­making is presented, demonstrating that constructs are approached differently between involvement levels. A conceptual model providing steps for transferring knowledge gained from the research to practice is also developed. Practical implications This research aids in the dispersion of information among stakeholders so that sustainability and energy efficiency can be part of the standard real estate conversation. Social implications Sustainability and energy efficiency (SEE) housing is seen as a niche market and this research will help alter the behaviour of the stakeholders in order to incentivise consumers to change their purchase patterns to include SEE features. Originality/value Most of the work on ethical consumption deals with low-­involvement products. This study addresses high-­involvement ethical consumption within the housing market through a qualitative approach.

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<p>This dissertation interrogates the ways in which the ethical rhetoric following September 11th, 2001 (particularly that of the administration of U.S. President George Bush) and contemporary globalization (which Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have called "Empire") implicate one other, as well as the ways in which these interlinked discourses are currently shaping the post-9/11 global "ethical climate" and its universalized human subject. Drawing upon Jacques Derrida's concept of "hauntology" which he introduces in Specters of Marx (1994), the main argument of the thesis is that the dominant post-9/11 ethical rhetoric is a specter of Empire, such that it is both a symptom of and a particularly influential force-of-law shaping the "Spirit" of contemporary globalization/Empire. The thesis claims that in their shared universalism, neo-Hegelian remainders of idealism, and theocratic impulses to contain and ethicopolitically manage the entire world, globalization/Empire and its most serious recent symptoms-Bush's post-9/11 ethical rhetoric and the global war on terror--contain suicidal auto-deconstructive tendencies that threaten to destroy themselves from within in spite of their utopic visions of themselves. Finally, the dissertation investigates some of the key spectral remainders of "9/11" and contemporary ethical thought which contradict and/or corroborate the dominant post-9/11 discourse of Empire and its universalized ethico-political human subject.</p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

A Critical Examination of A.J. Ayer's Moral Philosophy Ayer' s overall notion of ethics is that all normative ethical statements are cognitively meaningless. This thesis is an attempt to refute this claim. Ayer's notion is based, I think, on his following two convictions: ( i ) ethical statements are purely emotive, (ii) reasoning from factual premises to ethical conclusions is neither deductive nor inductive. Ethical statements are, according to Ayer, purely emotive because they are pure expressions of the feelings and emotions of the speaker. This means that ethical statements do not even report the speaker's mental state. I have shown that there are some voluntarily uttered ethical statements which are not expressive and hence that some ethical statements are not purely emotive. The controversy whether ethical statements can be deduced formally from factual statements is very old. I have switched the problem to a different direction by showing that the induction/deduction dichotomy is not adequate for reasoning. Other reasoning processes, like informal reasoning, allow one to deduce ethical conclusions from factual premises. It is also shown how Ayer's criterion of meaning, namely the verification principle, renders ethical statements meaningful. Finally, I have defended universalistic act-utilitarianism as a cognitive theory of ethics. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

Hans Jonas ranks among a small but expanding group of recent ethicists who have argued that a robust ethical theory must account for human ontological considerations. He is among those who make claims that such considerations issue from biological foundations. In The Phenomenon of Life, he reclaims elements of the Aristotelian biological ontology of the soul while adjusting this ontology to the theory of evolution. The first problem with Aristotelian biological ontology, one suffering from essentialism, is the confrontation with the biological flux of species, presented in the Darwinian theory of natural selection. The dissertation explains that Jonas was correct in his return to Aristotle, insofar as there are elements of human beings that are natural and universal. The task is to follow Jonas by constructing a robust philosophical anthropology. Jonas's philosophical anthropology understands human beings as nature's most magnificent and advanced examples of what he calls "needful freedom." Jonas's argument includes a refutation of reductive materialism and epiphenomenalism, one that leaves the possibilities of the human soul/consciousness and freedom in at least as good a position as offered by Kant. His argument is also an attempt to rescue ontology, human nature, and ethics from the relativism of Heideggerian thought. He does this by replacing Heidegger's concept of "thrown projection" with an idea of "projection" based on biological ontology. With this ontological foundation in place, Jonas's "ethics of the future" sees human beings as the caretakers not only of themselves but of the totality of nature and not simply for anthropocentric reasons. Jonas's philosophical anthropology was incomplete insofar as it lacked an accounting of sexual reproduction, a key element for Jonas's ethical theory where political responsibility is modeled after parenthood. After offering a critique of Jonas's incomplete philosophical anthropology and the gap it leaves for his ethical theory, this dissertation shows that the value of his contribution remains intact. / Philosophy

I develop a connection between Hegel's account of Ethical Life (Sittlichkeit) and his ontology, arguing that Ethical Life draws out some of the more intuitive and subtle sides of Hegel's ontology on the one hand, and some of its more ambitious and challenging aspects on the other. Ethical Life, for Hegel, signifies our lived, normative, concrete social reality; my central claim is that Hegel uses this account to illustrate (and support) some of his key ontological convictions. I begin by showing how Ethical Life figures centrally in Hegel's attempt to ontologically prioritize intelligibility. Chapter One is devoted to Hegel's case for this ontological priority: essentially, the argument is that we ought to accept (and implicitly already do accept) the adequacy of thought to being, and that this adequacy entails that the object in its fully experienceable multilayered depth is its fundamentally "real" form. I then argue, in Chapter Two, that Ethical Life develops an account of the Self-World relation better able to accommodate a world of such intelligible objects: Ethical Life premises itself on "Self-World mutual-constitution," where Self and World each are what they are in virtue of the greater relation between them. This integrated relationship, this greater whole, becomes the ground on and out of which such intelligible objects can emerge, develop, and sustain themselves. The dissertation's second half further defines key strands of Hegel's ontology, such as the demand that a philosophically viable ontological model be a wholly self-contained and self-explanatory, self-supporting and self-determining, intelligibility- and process-oriented totalistic whole. This demand comes out, for example, in Hegel's critique of Kant, which is the topic of Chapter Three. There, I argue that Hegel charges Kant with an ontological conservatism, with retaining "pure" forms of subjectivity and objectivity, the possibility of which had been made questionable by the transcendental turn. Hegel instead suggests that we drop such problematic notions as Things-in-themselves or Pure Concepts of the Understanding, opting instead to simply recast the experienced world as conceptually determined appearances per se. The conceptual self-determination of appearances, meanwhile, is something Hegel will associate with his notion of Reason, and in Chapters Four and Five, I consider the relation of Ethical Life to this notion of Reason. Hegel characterizes Ethical Life as "actual Reason," and I argue in Chapter Four that the currently prevalent, non-metaphysical readings of Hegel's social thought (what I call the rational justifiability reading) are incomplete to the extent that they fail to adequately integrate into their account the fact that Reason, for Hegel, is (among other things) an ontologically operative principle. Hegel identifies Reason with the experienced world's conceptual self-determination, or with the intelligible framework which structures, animates, and stabilizes the experienced world. This identification is essential to Hegel, in that it methodologically opens up the possibility of developing an account that not only can be intellectually identified with the experienced world, but can be directly, experientially recognized in (or as) the experienced world. In Chapter Five, I argue that Ethical Life plays a key role here by offering an account --even an illustration-- of Reason in its operation as the experienced world's conceptual self-determination. Custom and Fate, two concepts encountered in Ethical Life, portray an uncomprehending intuition of the experienced world's conceptual self-determination in the moment of its concrete operation; the "internal" experience of this process described in Ethical Life also displays how intelligible principles can immanently sustain and determine the experienced world. Ethical Life, I ultimately argue, brings Hegel's ontology down to earth, so to speak. Through Ethical Life, we come to see that a number of Hegel's less-familiar and more seemingly foreboding claims can be associated with recognizable phenomena, or even identified with the experienced world. Yet, simultaneously, recognizing this connection helps us appreciate the ambition of Hegel's challenge to us to reconsider our presuppositions: we experience reality to be richly complex yet intelligibly ordered --Hegel's ontology asks us now to take seriously the implications of the possibility of our experience's being a veritable revelation of reality. / Philosophy

Facial recognition systems pose numerous ethical challenges around privacy, racial and gender bias, and accuracy, yet little guidance is available for designers and developers. We explore solutions to these challenges in a four-phase design process to create Civil War Twin (CWT), an educational web-based application where users can discover their lookalikes from the American Civil War era (1861-65) while learning more about facial recognition and history. Through this design process, we synthesize industry guidelines, consult with scholars of history, gender, and race, evaluate CWT in feedback sessions with diverse prospective users, and conduct a usability study with crowd workers. We iteratively formulate design goals to incorporate transparency, inclusivity, speculative design, and empathy into our application. We found that users' perceived learning about the strengths and limitations of facial recognition and Civil War history improved after using CWT, and that our design successfully met users' ethical standards. We also discuss how our ethical design process can be applied to future facial recognition applications. / Master of Science / Facial recognition systems, such as those used in cities, smartphone application and airports, pose numerous ethical challenges around privacy, racial and gender bias, and accuracy. Little guidance is available for designers and developers to create ethical facial recognition systems. We explore solutions to these ethical challenges of creating facial recognition systems in a four-phase design process to create Civil War Twin (CWT), an educational web-based application where users can discover their lookalikes from the American Civil War era (1861-65) while learning more about facial recognition and history. CWT allows users to upload a selfie, select search preferences (e.g., military service, gender, ethnicity), and use facial recognition to discover their "Civil War twins" (i.e., photographs of people from the American Civil War era who look like them). Through this design process, we synthesize industry guidelines, consult with scholars of history, gender, and race, evaluate CWT in feedback sessions with diverse prospective users, and conduct a usability study. We iteratively formulate design goals to incorporate transparency, inclusivity, critical thinking, and empathy into our application. We found that users' perceived learning about the strengths and limitations of facial recognition and Civil War history improved after using CWT, and that our design successfully met users' ethical standards. We also discuss how our ethical design process can be applied to future facial recognition applications.

yes / Drawing from the Non-Lethal Weapons Database this report summarises and reviews: non-lethal technology research and development issues, themes and trends developments in non-lethal military organisation and co-ordination capacity recent developments in selected non-lethal technologies commercial opportunities and applications of non-lethal technology ethical and social implications of non-lethal technolgy non-lethal human bioeffect research

Yes / Research ethics review by ethics committees has grown in importance since the end of the Nuremberg trials in 1949. However, ethics committees have come under increasing criticisms either for been ‘toothless or too fierce’ (Fistein & Quilligan, 2012:224). This paper presents a personal account of my experience in obtaining ethical approval for my PhD study from a UK university and the ethical dilemmas encountered in the fieldwork in Ghana. In this paper I question whether strict adherence to ethical guidelines developed from western perspectives is useful in conducting research in non-western societies. As more academics are increasingly been mandated to undertake international research, the paper argues for more flexibility in the ethical approval process to accommodate cultural differences.